Emily Rich is a 47-year-old mother of three. She has taught English-as-a-Second-Language at Northern Virginia Community College. She is taking time off to work on a memoir entitled The Paw of the Family Beast about trying to make peace with her family during the months both her and her mother were going through cancer treatment.

A Monitored Heart

About two years after I finished chemotherapy I had to be fitted with a portable heart monitor. It was temporary, to determine if tamoxifen, the drug I was taking post-breast cancer, was giving me heart palpitations.

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Molly Gleeson has been teaching English overseas for the last seven years.  Besides China, she has also taught in Japan and Saudi Arabia, and on-line in Afghanistan. When she isn’t fooling around with young Chinese men, she enjoys reading, writing, and doing all sorts of crafts. She’s continually working on a book about her travels, with the emphasis on “continually.”

How Do You Say Threesome in Chinese?

BETTER TIMES AHEAD read the wallpaper on the ceiling. I read it while having my hair washed in a trendy hair salon in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, China. English is still a popular thing to sport on clothes and other items, and the day before I had spotted a woman who was wearing a t-shirt that said merely, FORGET. So I was trying to do one and believe the other. I have spent five years, off and on, in China, and this was proving to be the loneliest yet. Mostly this was on purpose, knowing the foolishness I had engaged in in my 30s, and knowing that that foolishness hadn’t provided anything but embarrassing memories.

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Jason Good is a comedian, writer, and numerous other things he's not willing to admit publicly.  A children's book based on his blog post, “3 Minutes Inside the Head of My 2 Year Old” is due to be released in 2013. He is also a contributing writer to Parents Magazine. Jason lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons, and enjoys making them laugh more than anyone. If you understand sarcasm, follow him on twitter.

Not Chasing Amy

none;text-autospace:none">We were nestled in the relationship sweet spot: lying on separate sofas watching Gwyneth Paltrow deliver her Oscar acceptance speech for Shakespeare in Love. Then Amy muted the television and cleared her throat. The words came off her tongue too cleanly to be natural, making me suspect that her cats had heard them a few times before I did.

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Lisa Robertson’s poetry and short fiction have appeared in the Salt River Review, The Apple Valley Review, Word Riot, the forthcoming Tahoe Blues Anthology, and have received an honorable mention from Glimmer Train in the December 2011 Fiction Open contest. She is the tiniest bit relieved that this essay was rejected by Modern Love, because she had promised her husband that upon acceptance, she would forgive him for the wedding ring disaster. Turns out, he is still very much on the hook.

Conflict Free

My grandmother had worn a two-carat princess cut diamond solitaire wedding ring for most of her adult life. My own mother, in defiance of her mom, had worn a plain gold band, so unadorned that her wearing it was nothing short of an act of war. And whenever I looked at my mother’s ring, I knew that I wanted the exact opposite.

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